5 ms·

Substack won't make you rich

52 points by AlbertCory 3y ago

farhanhubble 3y ago
Another sustainability crisis playing out is in the field of software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39085704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39085704
maerF0x0 3y ago
> You know, fellow authors: I’m often interested in what you have to say. But not interested enough to pay for it. Another thing to know is that engineers are notoriously cheap. For whatever reason we'll pay $100K for a degree, but not $5 for an article that helps us in the next hour or a tool that saves us an hour.
- aymar_99 3y ago
  It's more of a cost benefit analysis as the author pointed out. When so much of valuable content is surfacing in hackernews and other streams, it's not cheap, rather a wise decision not to spend money.
  - megaman821 3y ago
    I got tired of the these I like to use and the people I like to read disappearing. Now I just pay a few bucks a month for everything, and things just stopped disappearing. I don't have to worry about switching apps or finding new people read, which I would have pay with time instead of money.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  That's because the degree helps us get more money in a direct and easily understandable way. A tool that saves an hour doesn't save us an hour, it saves our employer an hour. We don't get to home home an hour early when we save our employer an hour. You're looking at an entirely rational chain of logic.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
Out of the tech authors that I read, seems like Lenny and Gergely are printing money, but everybody else is unlikely to be even breaking even. But like with YouTube, Twitch and OnlyFans, it's imperative that people feel like there's a chance a chance of them joining the ranks of superstars, or growth stops.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  disagree. many people do not expect to become rich but do it for fun
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Many yes. Most even. But quite a few do expect to become rich/well compensated. Which is why there's a huge meta-group of people selling the dream ("How to make money on Substack/YouTube/Instagram/whatever platform"), with books, seminars, tutorials, sponsored content, and so on - each with tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers...
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      damn. I meant to include something about "make millions selling Amway" and "make millions selling Mary Kay Cosmetics." Those are yesterday's hotness.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      Is that really any different from aspirational athletes, musicians, or actors? Everyone knows that only the 0.1% have wild success. The N% below that can make a non-glamorous living from it.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >Is that really any different from aspirational athletes, musicians, or actors? Yes, not for Substack (as teens don't like this "writing" thing much), but e.g. a huge number of teens (and 20-somethings) tries to be vlogger, influencer, etc - more than athletes, musicians, or actors which is more of a 'far away' dream.
paulpauper 3y ago
Like this for anything with low barriers to entry. On the opposite extreme are tech jobs, in which the Iq barrier is higher but so is median pay.
renegade-otter 3y ago
Correction - it won't make most authors rich. It's like cooking - most chefs are ruining their health with 14-hour-days for pennies, and like five others are crushing it. You have to be really, REALLY good.
- paulpauper 3y ago
  or just lucky. as someone who reads a lot of blogs, the top substack bloggers are not that much better, if at all ,compared to obscure ones
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Or hard working, at the right thing - ie marketing. Most creatives, programmers included, believe "if you write it, they will come." The successful ones though are the ones who got good at selling it.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      Hard work and/or luck. Usually both, but not always. Occasionally you hear of someone (Rodriguez in Searching for Sugar Man) who makes it big despite doing nothing at all to promote himself. And hard working folks who go nowhere. I'm watching a documentary right now about Jonathan Ramie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen. He struggled for 20 years, not even having health insurance.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Are the chefs that are crushing it "really, REALLY good", or just good, comparable perhaps to tens of thousands of others (and worse than many of them) that nonetheless aren't crushing it?
  - bsder 3y ago
    With chefs, it seems like they really are crushing it. I've heard of a couple of top chefs who got burned out, went and started "something else" away from their fame, which then proceeded to crush it as well. Of course, there is a lot of survivorship bias. I never heard of the ones who never crushed it or who started the second thing and it failed. However, the fact that there are a non-trivial number of chefs who crush it multiple times seems to suggest that there is something that they have. Even people like Anthony Bourdain acknowledge that there is a VAST gulf in capability between people like himself and the people who went and survived those big name restaurant kitchens.
stevenfoster 3y ago
Here for the Manchester United / Manchester City comments in response to that roster faux pas.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Fixed. Thanks. (I was aware they were different.)
strken 3y ago
How many authors on Substack expect to make a living from it? I get that if you have e.g. an Onlyfans or a full time acting career you expect to earn money, but how many writers have that expectation?
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  > how many writers have that expectation? Caroline O'Donoghue talks about exactly that issue on her blog "Sentimental Garbage": https://sentimentalgarbage.substack.com/ https://sentimentalgarbage.substack.com/ In short, most writers take any kind of commercial copy/edit/writer work to pay the bills. During down times, they work on their book.
gnicholas 3y ago
Substack seems to be lucrative for folks who use it in combination with another complementary publishing platform. If you write a bunch of articles on Substack and then put together a book made up largely of said articles, it can be good because it doesn't really cost you anything extra. Also, if you have a podcast then you can use similar content for both.
throwaway4good 3y ago
Really? That is rather surprising - time to jump on TikTok. And Twitter X.
throwaway201606 3y ago
The "curation is an great addition to value" argument is certainly a powerful one. I agree with the position that it makes sense to pay for a selection of writing (or other content) that someone, who truly deeply understands their demographic, puts together. This site ( HN ) is certainly proof of that. It is effectively a magazine curated by its readers (upvotes/downvotes) for 'my deomographic' which is the demographic of everyone on here I guess. In the novel "Fall", Neal Stephenson developed a theme I found profoundly insightful - the internet becomes a morass of trash so to get anything out of it, you gotta be selective about what you read or consume. Selectivity, for characters in the book, was effected by subscribing to 'edit streams' - content pushed to them by editors who figured out what they should see for news and what they should see elsewhere from the arts, science, anything. The super wealthy have personal editors - bespoke curated balanced content that was super expensive since one essentially is paying for person to "pre-read" and "grade" everything. The 'middle class’ subscribes to one or more cheaper good shared 'edit streams' that had balanced and nuanced selection made possible by amortizing the cost over a ton of subscribers - a magazine. Everyone else consumes what FAANG equivalents and bottom of the barrel anybodies pushes out for free on the "Your Feed" streams. Since they are free, you are the product. Anything on those is largely driven by agenda - think "the right vs the left", propaganda, 'just because I have a mic", anarchy, pick your poison. Two thoughts pop to mind out of all this - just occurred to me that Facebook's / TikTok's /YouTube's etc "For You" streams are just really bad, (very addictive) very poorly edited magazines. Can't really make money from them because they are the equivalent of a old-timey pulp magazine. - (this is the biggie) these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc). Just send me a cash "Thank You" to cover college bills and the mortgage for this idea.
- moring 3y ago
  > these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc) Not sure what you mean by "patented, TM, etc". Other than that, I think this should already be possible from the outside e.g. by setting up a Patreon whose sole point is to provide a curated list of content from other platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, and already has a payment mechanism. This hinges on the fact that content can be linked from the outside, but any approach will be subject to the mercy of the big platforms that host the actual content.
gnicholas 3y ago
> Of all these writers I subscribe to for free: would I be willing to pay a single price for all of them together? That might be worth $10 a month Fair enough, but a magazine is largely filled with advertisements, which is where much/most of the revenue comes from. I like that Substack does not have ads like this.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  There are magazines with no ads, like Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated in its early days.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Sure, but that's not exactly comparable to most Substacks (at least the popular ones).
  - freddie_mercury 3y ago
    Consumer Reports is able to do that because it makes $260 million a year from subscribers. The only magazines in the world with more subscribers ADAC Motowelt in Germany and AARP and Costco's magazines in the US. They have a scale that makes it possible to forgo advertising that isn't really applicable to other magazines.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rch 3y ago
I'm not sure how many paid substacks I'm signed up for, but it's a few. Average writers, like most professionals, need to associate themselves with a well known brand. No surprise there.
ahupp 3y ago
I'm not sure who this is directed at. A more interesting question is, does Substack expand the number of people who can support themselves by writing vs a world without it? I personally spend over $1k/yr on Substack; sometimes because I get great value out of the paid posts, and more often because I want to author to keep working in an area I care about.
- beachy 3y ago
  > I personally spend over $1k/yr on SubstacK I imagine your photo might be up on a "whales" board back at Substack HQ, and the growth team might refer to you by name in their weekly meetings when they hypothesise on how to attract more like you.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    If there's one universal truth about whales, it's that there's always a bigger fish. Every time I've heard about a real-life whale, I've been out by multiple orders of magnitude from my wildest guess. And yes I know whales are mammals but facts don't get in the way of puns.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      I liked the use of "whale." I'm just not one. Or the addictive type, either. I had rotator cuff surgery last month, and a couple people joked, "Oh, you get these really good drugs for the pain!" I had Percocet (oxycodone + ibuprofen). It did nothing for me; no high at all. I wonder if there's a connection.
      - skydhash 3y ago
        These are really good. I had them after removing my wisdom teeth (less than easy operation as they came out horizontally) I stopped taking them as soon as the pain subsides because I understand why someone can be addicted to them. The pain just vanishes a few moment after ingestion.
fortran77 3y ago
I never paid for a Medium blog, but I subscribe to three Substacks. It may not "make you rich" but it's the only pay-to-read blog platform that got me to open my wallet!
Exoristos 3y ago
Substack has some great writers, for sure. But unfortunately something about the marketing and business model seems to induce a large portion of Substack users to treat it as a kind of pyramid scheme. People cannibalize each other's subscribers, subscribe to each other as a favor or for strategic reasons, and of course there's the barrage of self-interested comments on every new celebrity Substack post. Further, Substack themselves pepper everything with sales pitches, and even remove comments that might appear to question their claims. There's a bad smell there, and I ended up leaving.

52 points by AlbertCory 3y ago

Another sustainability crisis playing out is in the field of software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39085704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39085704

maerF0x0 3y ago

> You know, fellow authors: I’m often interested in what you have to say. But not interested enough to pay for it. Another thing to know is that engineers are notoriously cheap. For whatever reason we'll pay $100K for a degree, but not $5 for an article that helps us in the next hour or a tool that saves us an hour.

aymar_99 3y ago
It's more of a cost benefit analysis as the author pointed out. When so much of valuable content is surfacing in hackernews and other streams, it's not cheap, rather a wise decision not to spend money.
- megaman821 3y ago
  I got tired of the these I like to use and the people I like to read disappearing. Now I just pay a few bucks a month for everything, and things just stopped disappearing. I don't have to worry about switching apps or finding new people read, which I would have pay with time instead of money.
lelanthran 3y ago
That's because the degree helps us get more money in a direct and easily understandable way. A tool that saves an hour doesn't save us an hour, it saves our employer an hour. We don't get to home home an hour early when we save our employer an hour. You're looking at an entirely rational chain of logic.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago

Out of the tech authors that I read, seems like Lenny and Gergely are printing money, but everybody else is unlikely to be even breaking even. But like with YouTube, Twitch and OnlyFans, it's imperative that people feel like there's a chance a chance of them joining the ranks of superstars, or growth stops.

paulpauper 3y ago
disagree. many people do not expect to become rich but do it for fun
- coldtea 3y ago
  Many yes. Most even. But quite a few do expect to become rich/well compensated. Which is why there's a huge meta-group of people selling the dream ("How to make money on Substack/YouTube/Instagram/whatever platform"), with books, seminars, tutorials, sponsored content, and so on - each with tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers...
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    damn. I meant to include something about "make millions selling Amway" and "make millions selling Mary Kay Cosmetics." Those are yesterday's hotness.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Is that really any different from aspirational athletes, musicians, or actors? Everyone knows that only the 0.1% have wild success. The N% below that can make a non-glamorous living from it.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >Is that really any different from aspirational athletes, musicians, or actors? Yes, not for Substack (as teens don't like this "writing" thing much), but e.g. a huge number of teens (and 20-somethings) tries to be vlogger, influencer, etc - more than athletes, musicians, or actors which is more of a 'far away' dream.

paulpauper 3y ago

Like this for anything with low barriers to entry. On the opposite extreme are tech jobs, in which the Iq barrier is higher but so is median pay.

renegade-otter 3y ago

Correction - it won't make most authors rich. It's like cooking - most chefs are ruining their health with 14-hour-days for pennies, and like five others are crushing it. You have to be really, REALLY good.

paulpauper 3y ago
or just lucky. as someone who reads a lot of blogs, the top substack bloggers are not that much better, if at all ,compared to obscure ones
- bruce511 3y ago
  Or hard working, at the right thing - ie marketing. Most creatives, programmers included, believe "if you write it, they will come." The successful ones though are the ones who got good at selling it.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    Hard work and/or luck. Usually both, but not always. Occasionally you hear of someone (Rodriguez in Searching for Sugar Man) who makes it big despite doing nothing at all to promote himself. And hard working folks who go nowhere. I'm watching a documentary right now about Jonathan Ramie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen. He struggled for 20 years, not even having health insurance.
coldtea 3y ago
Are the chefs that are crushing it "really, REALLY good", or just good, comparable perhaps to tens of thousands of others (and worse than many of them) that nonetheless aren't crushing it?
- bsder 3y ago
  With chefs, it seems like they really are crushing it. I've heard of a couple of top chefs who got burned out, went and started "something else" away from their fame, which then proceeded to crush it as well. Of course, there is a lot of survivorship bias. I never heard of the ones who never crushed it or who started the second thing and it failed. However, the fact that there are a non-trivial number of chefs who crush it multiple times seems to suggest that there is something that they have. Even people like Anthony Bourdain acknowledge that there is a VAST gulf in capability between people like himself and the people who went and survived those big name restaurant kitchens.

stevenfoster 3y ago

Here for the Manchester United / Manchester City comments in response to that roster faux pas.

AlbertCory 3y ago
Fixed. Thanks. (I was aware they were different.)

strken 3y ago

How many authors on Substack expect to make a living from it? I get that if you have e.g. an Onlyfans or a full time acting career you expect to earn money, but how many writers have that expectation?

throwaway2037 3y ago
> how many writers have that expectation? Caroline O'Donoghue talks about exactly that issue on her blog "Sentimental Garbage": https://sentimentalgarbage.substack.com/ https://sentimentalgarbage.substack.com/ In short, most writers take any kind of commercial copy/edit/writer work to pay the bills. During down times, they work on their book.

gnicholas 3y ago

Substack seems to be lucrative for folks who use it in combination with another complementary publishing platform. If you write a bunch of articles on Substack and then put together a book made up largely of said articles, it can be good because it doesn't really cost you anything extra. Also, if you have a podcast then you can use similar content for both.

throwaway4good 3y ago

Really? That is rather surprising - time to jump on TikTok. And Twitter X.

throwaway201606 3y ago

The "curation is an great addition to value" argument is certainly a powerful one. I agree with the position that it makes sense to pay for a selection of writing (or other content) that someone, who truly deeply understands their demographic, puts together. This site ( HN ) is certainly proof of that. It is effectively a magazine curated by its readers (upvotes/downvotes) for 'my deomographic' which is the demographic of everyone on here I guess. In the novel "Fall", Neal Stephenson developed a theme I found profoundly insightful - the internet becomes a morass of trash so to get anything out of it, you gotta be selective about what you read or consume. Selectivity, for characters in the book, was effected by subscribing to 'edit streams' - content pushed to them by editors who figured out what they should see for news and what they should see elsewhere from the arts, science, anything. The super wealthy have personal editors - bespoke curated balanced content that was super expensive since one essentially is paying for person to "pre-read" and "grade" everything. The 'middle class’ subscribes to one or more cheaper good shared 'edit streams' that had balanced and nuanced selection made possible by amortizing the cost over a ton of subscribers - a magazine. Everyone else consumes what FAANG equivalents and bottom of the barrel anybodies pushes out for free on the "Your Feed" streams. Since they are free, you are the product. Anything on those is largely driven by agenda - think "the right vs the left", propaganda, 'just because I have a mic", anarchy, pick your poison. Two thoughts pop to mind out of all this - just occurred to me that Facebook's / TikTok's /YouTube's etc "For You" streams are just really bad, (very addictive) very poorly edited magazines. Can't really make money from them because they are the equivalent of a old-timey pulp magazine. - (this is the biggie) these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc). Just send me a cash "Thank You" to cover college bills and the mortgage for this idea.

moring 3y ago
> these FAANGs should set up some way for folks to make money through curation of their content (patented, TM, etc) Not sure what you mean by "patented, TM, etc". Other than that, I think this should already be possible from the outside e.g. by setting up a Patreon whose sole point is to provide a curated list of content from other platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, and already has a payment mechanism. This hinges on the fact that content can be linked from the outside, but any approach will be subject to the mercy of the big platforms that host the actual content.

gnicholas 3y ago

> Of all these writers I subscribe to for free: would I be willing to pay a single price for all of them together? That might be worth $10 a month Fair enough, but a magazine is largely filled with advertisements, which is where much/most of the revenue comes from. I like that Substack does not have ads like this.

AlbertCory 3y ago
There are magazines with no ads, like Consumer Reports and Cook's Illustrated in its early days.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  Sure, but that's not exactly comparable to most Substacks (at least the popular ones).
- freddie_mercury 3y ago
  Consumer Reports is able to do that because it makes $260 million a year from subscribers. The only magazines in the world with more subscribers ADAC Motowelt in Germany and AARP and Costco's magazines in the US. They have a scale that makes it possible to forgo advertising that isn't really applicable to other magazines.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

rch 3y ago

I'm not sure how many paid substacks I'm signed up for, but it's a few. Average writers, like most professionals, need to associate themselves with a well known brand. No surprise there.

ahupp 3y ago

I'm not sure who this is directed at. A more interesting question is, does Substack expand the number of people who can support themselves by writing vs a world without it? I personally spend over $1k/yr on Substack; sometimes because I get great value out of the paid posts, and more often because I want to author to keep working in an area I care about.

beachy 3y ago
> I personally spend over $1k/yr on SubstacK I imagine your photo might be up on a "whales" board back at Substack HQ, and the growth team might refer to you by name in their weekly meetings when they hypothesise on how to attract more like you.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  If there's one universal truth about whales, it's that there's always a bigger fish. Every time I've heard about a real-life whale, I've been out by multiple orders of magnitude from my wildest guess. And yes I know whales are mammals but facts don't get in the way of puns.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    I liked the use of "whale." I'm just not one. Or the addictive type, either. I had rotator cuff surgery last month, and a couple people joked, "Oh, you get these really good drugs for the pain!" I had Percocet (oxycodone + ibuprofen). It did nothing for me; no high at all. I wonder if there's a connection.
    - skydhash 3y ago
      These are really good. I had them after removing my wisdom teeth (less than easy operation as they came out horizontally) I stopped taking them as soon as the pain subsides because I understand why someone can be addicted to them. The pain just vanishes a few moment after ingestion.

fortran77 3y ago

I never paid for a Medium blog, but I subscribe to three Substacks. It may not "make you rich" but it's the only pay-to-read blog platform that got me to open my wallet!

Exoristos 3y ago

Substack has some great writers, for sure. But unfortunately something about the marketing and business model seems to induce a large portion of Substack users to treat it as a kind of pyramid scheme. People cannibalize each other's subscribers, subscribe to each other as a favor or for strategic reasons, and of course there's the barrage of self-interested comments on every new celebrity Substack post. Further, Substack themselves pepper everything with sales pitches, and even remove comments that might appear to question their claims. There's a bad smell there, and I ended up leaving.